Living on a farm is all about seasons especially when you want to make the most of the fertile soils of the North West Coast of Tasmania. This blog is a diary of growing, harvesting and preserving the produce of those soils just as I have been doing for the past 30 years. Come with me on my journey through the seasons. Maybe you will be inspired to grow and preserve your own too.

Monday, August 19, 2013

As the winter draws to an end, the garlic which I so carefully braided last summer is starting to sprout little shoots inside each clove. Looking for ways to preserve it, I found a recipe for roasted garlic oil in a recipe book a couple of weeks ago. If you try to store fresh garlic in oil, you run the risk of botulism so I am hoping that this roasted version is a safe way of using it. It was quite simple to make. First roast whole heads of garlic in foil in the oven until the garlic is soft and purée like. Squeeze each clove and collect the purée in a bowl.

Wizz the purée up with olive oil....I think I used a ratio of 3 heads of garlic to 200 ml of oil which makes it more oil than paste.

Then store in a jar in the fridge. I think it might be a good way of making garlic bread rather than using a butter crushed garlic mix so now I had better make some bread to try it with!

Also in my never ending quest to find kiwi fruit recipes, I tried a new idea. Instead of making my quick version of cider which I have written about in a previous post, I tried an apple kiwi version. Make some juice, add some brewing yeast, put in a PET bottle with an Oztop and leave in a warm spot for a few days to ferment.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Yet another wet weekend. Too wet to get outside in the garden again! So what can I get up to in the Preserving Patch kitchen? Last week I borrowed a book from the library called Five Minute Microwave Bottling which was not only about the obvious microwave bottling but also included a "quick" way of glazing fruit. Having looked at another book's recipe for making glacé fruit and comparing it with this method, I decided that yes it did look quicker......but everything is relative of course.

It still took me several steps over several hours with one mix of syrup ending up in the chook bucket before I had made a tasty but quite small batch of glacé kiwi fruit.

Not sure it was a particularly efficient use of my time but I guess I can add that to the list of things tried once. So if anyone ever gives you a homemade piece of glacé fruit - treasure every morsel!

Thursday, August 8, 2013

A friend of mine has been promising for ages to organise a sausage making session with someone she knows who has the right equipment and last weekend came good with the idea. Several helpers gathered to be shown how to make plain pork sausages and a fresh chorizo sausage. After a bit (well quite a bit really) of practice and fiddling around with casings that were a little small for the nozzle of the sausage attachment, we finally got the hang of producing reasonable sausages.

Needs more practice to get the right amount in each sausage I think as when we tried to twist them off to make several small sausages rather than one long one, they had a tendency to split their skins.

Still, they tasted delicious when grilled on the barbeque and then when I tried a pasta dish with sliced sausage, sour cream, paprika, parsley, eggs and home made parmesan for dinner the next night.

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About Me

I live on a dairy farm in Flowerdale on the North West coast of Tasmania where I have a large vegetable and fruit garden. For many years I have been harvesting and preserving the produce of my garden to enjoy all year round. I'm always looking for new ideas from around the world to experiment with, as well as the tried and true standards.